BOOKS ßR.IEFL Y NOTED 'I' f . U'R 'N5 FICTION N OBODY'S ANGEL by Thomas McGuane (Random House; $14.50). Still another telegraphic novel in which no one is described, the settings are barely sketched in, and the dialogue sounds like a Japanese translation of Hemingway. In short, the novel as film script. The story deals wi th a testy, hard -drink- ing United States Army tank captain named Pat- rick Fitzpatrick who quits the service and returns to his family's Montana horse ranch, tenanted by his half-crazy sister and his crabby, confused grandfather (His father, now dead, was a test pilot, and his mother is remarried and lives in California.) Fitzpatrick has a bitter, exhilarating behind-the-barn affair with an epileptic Oklahoma oil man's rich and beautiful wife (we know only that she has a "beveled face" with "gray-green eyes" and an "ineffable down-turned Southern mouth"), and ends up rejoining the tanks and leav- ing Montana forever. The book is crowded with suicides, physical out- rage, threatening talk, and gloomy images ("that evil ferret sadness"). . - __ U 'il GENERAL KARL MARX-FRIEDRICH ENGELS: SE- LEc'rED LE1:'TERS, edited by Fritz J. Raddatz, translated from the Ger- man by Ewald Osers (Little, Brown; $13.95). This exchange spans the period 1844-77, from the beginning of Marx and Engels' friendship and collaboration to the time when bad health had pretty much put an end to Marx's working days. The letters deal more with personal matters than with politics or revolutionary philosophy. Marx, from his chronically impoverished household in London, constantly importunes his friend for money, complains about his afflictions (car- buncles, liver disease, bronchitis, and insomnia were a few), gossips wickedly about mutual revolution- ary friends back In Germany, and laments his slow progress on his great work "Das Kapital." ("I do not believe," he once said, "that 'money' has ever been written about amidst such a shortage of money.") Engels, in Manchester, where he is manager of one of his father's tex- tile concerns, dutifully sends money when he can (he is living in style- riding to hounds, entertaining in an elegant town house, and maintain- ing two young Irish sisters in a pied- à-terre in the suburbs), commiser- ates with his friend's woes, and urges him to finish his magnum opus so that he can take his place as one of the revolutionary titans of Eu- rope. Marx comes across as a man of intellect, talent, and wit but also as malicious and I unfair, suspicious of every- UfM. . __'21 t one around him, and al- though a Jew by birth, vi- ciously anti-Semitic. Engels has a more tempered approach to life and better manners, but when he and the man whom he addresses as "the Moor" (because of Marx's swarthi- ness) get together on a job of char- acter assassination there is little to choose between them. WEBS OF POWER: INTERNArIONAL CARTELS AND THE WORLD ECON- OMY, by Kurt Rudolf Mirow and Harry Maurer (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95). This persuasive and intel- ligent book does not pretend to tell, or to know, everything about its subject, but the authors have un- earthed sufficient documentation to show that in several fields-includ- ing the electrical, chemical, oil, steel, textile, and uranium indus- tries-international cartels are op- erating, to the damage of both peo- ple and peoples. The authors recall the origins of some of today's car- tels; several antedate the First World War and were originally founded by national companies seek- ing to protect their home markets. Nowadays, cartels are usually agree- ments among transnational com- panies to pool patents and control raw materials as they allocate the I world's markets among their mem- bers. Mr. Mirow and Mr. Maurer I cite specific instances showing I how cartels hinder the development I of developing countries, injure the I American economy, and cheat con- I sumers everywhere. THE IMAGE OF WAR, 1861-65- I VOLUME II: THE GUNS OF '62 edited by William C. Davis (Doubleday; , --.. . '1 I 165 I 5 . I . $ . ."... Jr. " t ". ,I I' UNNING" "They have provided us with the proper names of the parts of practically every object on earth." - The New Yorker "ARCANE" [This book] ..... is taking a prominent place on my reference bookshelf along with the Gumness, the Roget's, assorted dictionanes, the Timetables of History and all those Wallace family books of lists " -DetroIt Free Press "FUNNY" ". . . I spent the better part of a night laughing at [this book] It laughed back" -Boston Globe WHAT'S WHAT A VISUAL GLOSSARY OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD Edited by DAVID FISHER and REGINALD BRAGONIER, JR. 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